The Devil in the Flesh Read Online Free PDF Page B

“It would have been too beautiful. You can’t choose your bed and sleep on it at the same time.”

VI
    ONE THING DID SURPRISE MY FATHER. THE LETTER from the deputy-headmaster never came. This was what caused the first row that he had had with me, believing I’d hidden the letter, that I’d then pretended not to have any motive for telling him the news, and that in this way I’d persuaded him to be lenient. In fact the letter didn’t exist. I thought I had been expelled from school, but I was wrong. So at the beginning of the holidays my father was baffled when we got a letter from the headmaster.
    He asked if I was ill, and if they should enrol me for the following year.

VII
    THE PLEASURE OF FINALLY GRATIFYING MY FATHER made up slightly for the romantic vacuum in which I found myself, for if I believed that I no longer loved Marthe, I regarded her at the very least as the only love worthy of me. In other words, I still loved her.
    This was the frame of mind I was in when at the end of November, a month after receiving the formal announcement of her marriage, I got home to find an invitation from Marthe which began: “I don’t understand why I haven’t heard from you. Why don’t you come and see me? You’ve probably forgotten that it was you who chose my furniture?…”
    Marthe lived at J …; her street lead down to the Marne. There were at most a dozen houses on each side. I was surprised that hers was so large. In fact she only lived on the first floor, while the owners and an elderly couple shared the ground floor.
    When I arrived for tea, it was already dark. The only sign of life was firelight at one window. Seeing it lit up by flickering flames like waves, I thought a fire was breaking out. The iron garden gate was half-open. Such carelessness surprised me. I looked for the doorbell; I couldn’t find it.Eventually, going up the three steps of the front entrance, I decided to tap on the ground-floor window on the right-hand side, where I could hear voices. An elderly woman came to the door; I asked where Madame Lacombe (this was Marthe’s new name) lived: “It’s upstairs.” I stumbled up the stairs in the dark, bumped into things, terrified that something dreadful had happened. I knocked on the door. Marthe opened it. I almost threw my arms round her neck, like virtual strangers do after surviving a shipwreck. But she wouldn’t have understood. She probably found me rather distraught, because my first words were to ask “Why is there a fire?”
    “While I was waiting for you, I lit a fire of olive wood in the salon, that’s all, and I’ve been reading by it.”
    As I walked into the small room that she used as a salon—in which there wasn’t much furniture and where the drapes and the carpet, which was as soft and thick as an animal’s coat, made the room so shrunken that it looked like the inside of a box—I felt happy and sad all at once, like a playwright who sees a performance of his play and realizes too late all its flaws.
    Marthe lay down in front of the fire again and started raking the embers, being careful not to mix the pieces of black wood with the ashes.
    “Maybe you don’t like the smell of olive wood? My parents-in-law sent me a supply from their place down in the Midi.”
    She seemed to be apologising for a minor element of her own invention in a room that was my creation. Perhaps this tiny detail ruined a whole that she didn’t quite understand.
    Quite the opposite. I was enchanted by the fire, andto see that, like me, she was anticipating roasting herself on one side and then turning over to do the other. Her grave, tranquil face had never been so beautiful as in this primitive light. By not spreading across the whole room, it retained its strength. The moment you moved away from it, all was darkness, and you stumbled over the furniture.
    Marthe didn’t know what it was to be in revolt. In her cheerfulness she was still serious.
    Lying beside her, my mind gradually grew